I DON’T WANT to start a food business that solely sells food,” said Francis Reyes, the 25-year-old CEO of Caravan Food Group, Inc., parent company of rolled ice cream store Elait and donut shop OverDoughs. “I want to send a message through food,” he added. “I want to hire people who the usual food entrepreneurs wouldn’t hire.”

AT THE height of the AlDub love team phenomenon, Diane Yap and Lauren Gavino, who had been running an online flower shop for only a month then, received an order for 49 stems of red Ecuadorian roses to be delivered at the Philippine Arena in Bulacan, where some concert with ticket sales reaching P14 million would be filled with 55,000 people.

YOUNG CHEF Miko Aspiras channeled memories of childhood playgrounds in the Philippines to create a special dessert for his presentation during Madrid Fusion Manila 2016.

WHEN 28-year-old Katrina Chan returned to the Philippines in 2012 after finishing her studies in the US, the local tech start-up community was just in the “awareness and capacity building” stage, a stark contrast to where she came from.

FROM MERE slacker uniform, skateboard attire has seeped into the runways of the world’s fashion capitals.

IN 2016, 22-year-old Charles Lim established his own company Veer Immersive Technologies, Inc. (Veer), dismissing a possible corporate career in line with his background in computer science.

WHY AREN’T PEOPLE starting more start-ups? That might seem like a weird question to ask, in an age when Silicon Valley ventures are hot commodities and money and talent is flooding into machine learning companies. But in fact, Americans don’t start businesses like they used to.

WHEN HEAD-HUNTING and executive search firm Manila Recruitment first rented out office spaces by ASPACE in Makati City in 2013, it started out with a “plug and play” concept— incorporating designs and work stations based on their immediate needs.

FROM ABOUT THE EARLY 1970s to the mid-1980s, both the Philippines and South Korea were under brutal authoritarian regimes. Filipinos ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos via people power in February 1986, which coincidentally was the watershed event that inspired South Koreans to remove their own despotic leader.

WITH THE GROWING demand for data scientists in today’s time of big data, machine learning, among others, and demand pegged to continue to outgrow supply (as said by McKinsey & Co.), two educational institutions in the Philippines have kick-started their own data science graduate programs.

EARLY in Warren Buffett’s life, his father failed to get hired at the family grocery store during the Great Depression. Without a job, and without any money after a run on the banks, the family of four ran up a tab of grocery bills at the store to put food on the table, and even then, his mother sometimes skipped meals. Leila Buffett, beset by stress and with a mind likely impacted by linotype fumes she inhaled as a child, would often berate her two small children.

YOUNG, RICH and surrounded by high-end toys.